Dan Pacheco, founder and CEO of BookBrewer, just signed a deal with Borders enabling authors to self-publish.

Greg Avery

A new Broomfield company’s service that helps authors publish electronic books themselves in just a few minutes is powering Borders bookstore’s self-publishing service for writers, too.

Borders.com book-selling website plans to prominently promote the BookBrewer self-publishing service through the holidays. That will give a further boost to a company that one month ago started distributing authors’ ebooks through Amazon.com, Apple’s store and other ebook sellers.

FeedBrewer Corp., the Internet software company that created BookBrewer, is one of a handful of U.S. companies trying to grab part of the booming ebook business by catering to the growing ranks of self-publishing authors.

“Self-publishers are so passionate about what they do, and they’re frustrated with publishing houses saying ‘no,’” said Dan Pacheco, FeedBrewer’s founder and CEO. “Rejection letters are getting more common.”

U.S. wholesale ebook revenue from sales retailers jumped from $33 million in the second quarter of 2009 to $88.7 million in the second quarter of 2010, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum. Self-publishing is a small fraction of that market.

BookBrewer charges $89.99 to publish an ebook, and it takes a 25 percent royalty on sales.

The upfront cost is far less than the typical print run for a physical self-published book. It’s also below the usual $125 a self-published author has to spend getting the registered ISBN number that many distributors, stores and libraries require a title to have.

BookBrewer’s authors get an ISBN and a web-based service that formats their manuscript in the different file types used by the Kindle, iPad, Nook and dozens of other ereaders entering the market.

It also distributes them to online ebook stores, and connects the title to the recommendation engines and other title promotions used by online booksellers.

BookBrewer can handle the publishing process for an author in as little 10 minutes. That ease won over Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders, said spokeswoman Mary Davis.

“We just thought they provided a great service in that it’s very easy for a blogger or author to package their content on our site,” she said. “It’s what we want our service to be about, making it as easy as possible for our customers to self-publish.”

Other companies, such as Lulu.com, Smashwords.com and Scribd.com, offer similar services.

Focus is on digital

Pacheco says BookBrewer’s advantage is that it doesn’t also print physical books — as do many of its competitors, Pacheco said. BookBrewer’s solely focused on digital distribution, so it has no investment to protect in printed self-publishing, which he believes will be a shrinking business.

BookBrewer may contract with on-demand printers for physical editions, too, if authors want that. But no author’s asked about that yet, Pacheco said.

Eric Elkins, a Denver online marketing consultant, writes a well-known blog called “The Dating Dad” about life as a divorced, single father. He’s also the published author of two traditional books. One is a teacher’s reference and the other a young adult novel called “Ray, reflected.”

He’d experienced so many publisher’s rejections for his novel years ago that he’d given up and put the manuscript away — until a chance encounter landed him Denver-based Ghost Road Press as a publisher.

Pacheco persuaded Elkins to use BookBrewer to publish an edited collection of “Dating Dad” blog posts from 2004-10 as an ebook. Elkins — a devoted reader of physical books and magazines who doesn’t own an ereader — is sold on the ebook concept, and with publishing one himself.

“There’s credibility with an ebook that I really hadn’t realized,” he said. “I’m glad I did it because it’s getting a fair amount of attention out there.”

The “Best of The Dating Dad” is too new to know how well it’ll sell, but he’s hearing feedback from blog readers, Elkins said.

From newspapers to books

Before starting FeedBrewer, Pacheco helped establish early newspaper websites at The Denver Post and Washington Post in the mid-1990s. He jumped to AOL to build its user-generated content services at the height of the Dulles, Va.-based company’s market power in 1999.

Starting in 2004, Pacheco, working mostly from Broomfield, helped The Bakersfield Californian newspaper develop online social networks and user-submitted news websites for readers.

He started FeedBrewer in early 2010 after realizing that the democratizing effect of the Internet and the relative ease of publishing ebooks were rapidly shaking up book publishing and selling.

The company has taken no outside money, and Pacheco hasn’t taken a paycheck in six months.

The entrepreneurial process is like a game of chicken — seeing how far the business can be developed before it either takes off or runs out of money and crashes, Pacheco said.

“You just can’t give up,” he said. “You’ve got to believe in what you do.”

The deal with Borders makes him a little less anxious about how things will work out.

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